


man or monster (or both?)

by 9_miho



Series: blue (white) caravan [2]
Category: Big Hero 6 (2014), Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Ghost Tadashi, Hiro Needs a Hug, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:46:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4030630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_miho/pseuds/9_miho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wasabi’s on the turret, even if he’s not the best shot of all of them.</p><p>(how a martial pacifist tries to manage a post-apocalyptic wasteland)</p>
            </blockquote>





	man or monster (or both?)

Wasabi hates, **hates** the feel of sand in his hair. Even when he’s shaved it down so short that he can feel the sun worming its way down between little spaces to send little darts of short hot irritation into his scalp, sand makes its way through the dense curly strands.

 

So Wasabi started greasing his locks to keep out the sand and he still hates that nearly as much but not quite as much as the sand. He’s given up on showers so he just wears as much as he can so he can keep that much clean and hold out for clean clothes (just a little longer, just a little longer). Unlike Fredzilla, Wasabi doesn’t wilt in heat even with layers and he can sit in the back turret just fine, letting whatever breeze coming by slip through vents in his hat and jacket and pants.

 

Their little library (tucked in a metal crate, easily slammed shut and thrown out to survive another day) has a book on human development with a tattered blue cover. He’s read that one over a dozen times and he always pauses over the passage that notes that too much stress stunts growth, stunts a lifetime. He wonders how much he’s shaved off his life with his worry about the sand and oil and keeping clean, because it hasn’t done anything to keep him short (and the height, the big shoulders, that means something out here, which he’s grateful for, because that’s one fewer bullet or missile or slash or stab that might have to be delivered, up close and personal).

 

For the past year (he counts moon phases on a knotted string he wears around his left wrist), Wasabi has taken on worry for two people and if he could add on some more, he would, every time he looks at Hiro. A dead guy’s worry is heavier than the gun that he keeps on his lap and the machete he keeps sheathed by his side.

 

(Honey Lemon is the best shot of all of them once she gets her glasses off, with Gogo as a very close second, but Wasabi can shoot fast and close enough in the general direction to do a pretty good bluff and bullets are sent with prayers of _just go away_ )

 

It’s heavy for a thing you can’t measure or cut apart or boil down in Honey Lemon’s still. In the turret, the weight on his chest and shoulders kind of eases. Because he’s away from everyone. But at the same time, it’s heavy still because an empty landscape has dangers, past, present, future.

 

(He tries to pretend that it’s not empty, because he’s drawing maps, first drawn faintly on precious paper and then put to canvas and oil skin that he and Honey Lemon stitch with thread from shredded clothes beyond saving that’s colored with the dyes that Wasabi doesn’t ask too closely about because _he doesn’t want to know_.)

 

But if it’s heavy, he’s still got big enough shoulders to keep going, and not just on his own. Big enough to carry the double digit deaths on his hands, the faces he refuses to let himself forget because that’s the least he could do for them, even if they were trying to kill him first or hurt the others or _dare scratch the paint job_. He tells himself Baymax isn’t more important than their mad, strange arrangement of misfits ( _heroes_ , Fredzilla insists) but just as important because Baymax is the – child? “avatar?” memory? – of the one who isn’t there. For that, Wasabi can have the anger and hate be distilled as one hot searing burn for a single horrible moment and have it not linger (from a “food magazine with Top 10 Restaurants for Singles” that Fredzilla picked up - “wasabi is a fast and hot burn, like igniting a cloud of flammable gas, boom and it’s gone”).

 

“Thanks,” Wasabi says, half grateful, half self-conscious, as he presses his bare palm against his metal seat (a hinged shelf that’s narrow but curved enough to make a backside not ache nearly so much). Baymax hums beneath him as they fly across the dunes, cutting out a path.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from comic descriptions of “The Incredible Hulk.” Figuring the line of reasoning for Wasabi’s name was by accidental flipping through TVTropes late at night.
> 
> The girls as the best shots are derived from the movie, since both of them have projectile weapons, whereas Wasabi is more of a melee fighter and Fredzilla’s main distance weapon is a flamethrower.


End file.
